I Solemnly Swear That I Am Up to No Good

Dear friends:

He's off getting drunk now, so it's safe to write. I am sorry I worried you all so much. I hope you won't be too angry at me if I tell you I've had my journal back for a week. I had the ink, and I could have written. But I didn't.

It's difficult to explain. But I'll do my best to tell you why. To do that, I have to be honest with you. Much more honest than I've ever been with you before, even Hermione. That's hard for me to do. But things have changed since I'm back with him, and I need to do that. To really tell the truth. What's more, I think that you deserve nothing less than the truth.

I'm sorry, but I'll warn you: it won't be easy to hear.

When I left Hogwarts, I was so angry. I was absolutely furious. You have to understand: I had never let myself get angry at him before, because it was so dangerous to do so. I mean, I had never ever even said aloud before that I hated him. At the same time, I was scared out of my mind. I still think I made the right decision to leave. But it was so terribly hard to go back to him. It had been a long time since I'd played the role of crawling boot. It was almost like I'd forgotten how. And going back to it, especially of my own free will, felt like...like deliberately crawling into slime and pulling it over me and smothering myself. To make things worse, I knew there was a real risk that he could kill me.

So for the first week, between the terror and the fury, I could barely move or speak. Fortunately, he was in a really good mood at first. Killing somebody always does that to him.

He got over it, though. The second week he just about tore me apart.

I'm sorry, I told you it wouldn't be easy for you to hear, but it's true. He hit me with a bunch of dark hexes, laid me up for three days, but that wasn't enough for him. A week after that, he beat the snot out of me. He broke every finger in my left hand, knocked out four of my teeth, and punched me in the gut so hard that I'm pretty sure he ruptured something inside me.

When I woke up, I found my journal beside me. He'd given it back to me.

Part of me wanted to die. Just to get it over with. I thought I'd never see any of you again, and I wavered a bit there, not even knowing the point of going on living. But I opened the journal and I read it. Maybe he wanted me to read it because he thought I'd see you were getting on with your lives and forgetting about me, but of course he didn't know about the secret entries. I must have read the stuff you wrote to me over a hundred times. Telling me to hang on. Telling me that you'd stick with me, that I was still a wizard and a student of Hogwarts, and that you wouldn't forget me. Thinking through all the ways you could try to help me.

You'll never know how much that meant to me.

I waited until he was drunk and I pulled out my wand and I used the healing spells that I'd seen Madam Pomfrey do, as best as I could. And I lay there and watched him snuffling and grunting in his sleep, drooling and stinking, and I thought it all out. Thought it out as cold and as clear as I could. He'd torn me apart, but I've spent the last week putting myself back together.

It's as if there's a boot part of me and a Terry part of me. I don't think there ever would have been a Terry part of me, the wizard, the human being, if it hadn't been for you. I'd sort of flowed between the two of them at Hogwarts, back and forth, because I had to. But the time has come to choose, and I choose this:

I decided that I wanted to live. I decided to take you at your word. That you'll help me.

From now on, I'll still play 'boot,' but I know and you know it'll only be a mask. The real me is Terry. I won't call him 'Master' in my mind anymore, nor ever say it to you. From now on, he's the git, the bastard, the monster. But he doesn't own me. He never will again.

I'll do what I have to do to protect Hermione, but when it's safe to get away, I'm going to escape him. Maybe by becoming an animagus.

And if I have to kill him in order to escape, I'll do it.

Now, to answer your questions:

The bracelet you have given me has worked really well. He stripped me of everything I had the first day I came back to him and forced me to stay naked for three days just to humiliate me, but the charm you put on it worked great, and I'm sure he never even noticed it. I'm forced to sleep on the floor beside his bed every night. He keeps me with me pretty much all the time, but every Friday night and Saturday night he goes on a bender and gets stinking drunk out of his mind. There's a window in the room I can open. I can't escape out of it because it's too high off the ground, but if you send an owl either early Saturday morning or Sunday morning, I'm sure it would be safe. He sleeps until noon on those mornings and nothing short of a dragon belching a ball of fire can possibly wake him. That's the only predictable thing about his schedule.

Here's what I need: a second bracelet like the first, yeah, and here's what I need in the beads. I need a basic book on diagnostic and healing spells. For both dark hexes and physical injuries. Like I said, I've watched Madam Pomfrey a lot over the years, and Merlin knows she's practised enough on me for me to get the gist of it. But I'd rather consult a book to make sure I'm doing it right. Particularly if I'm messing with my own insides. The thing worrying me the most right now is I do think he might have ruptured something inside of me because I can hardly walk without bending over. I managed to re-set and heal my fingers (I think), except for the fourth, because he really pulverized the bones, and I can't set it right. It'll all crooked. (Fortunately, my teeth aren't a problem. They always grow back the night after he knocks them out. It was my first sign of accidental magic when I was a kid. Some of my teeth he's knocked out over ten times.)

I'd like a second book about how to cast glamours. Madam Pomfrey used to heal me and then put a glamour over the spot so he'd think I was still bruised. It'd be a lot safer to heal myself if he can't tell I'm getting better faster than I should.

He's given me some rags, so at least I'm clothed again. The weather's warm so I don't need much in the way of clothing right now. He's not feeding me right at all. All I've had to eat since I left Hogwarts is bread and turnips and sometimes a little broth. If he goes on much longer, I'll maybe need some vitamin potions. But I'm hoping he'll eventually ease up and lessen the restrictions and I'll get to eat some of the better stuff from the kitchens.

Fixing the special ink's no problem. There's always sour wine around turned to vinegar. You can also send me George's journal in one of the beads, although I don't think I'll need it for now. But it'd be good to have it as a backup.

I just read this over and I'm sort of cringing at the thought of having you read it. It almost makes me feel a little ill, as if I'm stripping myself naked all over again, in a way.

But I'm trusting you by sending it anyway. I hope you can forgive me telling the truth and understand.

Your friend (and I really do believe that, and boy, it feels good to write it),

TERRY BOOT